"Texas"

It's Easter. It feels good to observe Jesus's resurrection lying in my bed in a camo snuggie. I've been working on "establishing a daily meditation practice." I think it works yall. It's hard to just sit and focus on focusing, but I can feel myself getting better.

I've been trying to work toward visualizing things with my eyes closed. It's hard! I can usually evoke some sort of feeling but never a particularly clear image. The book I'm reading recommends picturing different aspects of the Buddha. Those don't have any particular resonance for me, so I've been trying to come up with a different set of things to envision.

I realized I had already kind of discovered this practice for myself to help me counter some of my anxiety. I would take deep breaths and remember the serene galleries at the Yves Klein retrospective I saw at the Hirshhorn Museum. It makes sense; stabilizing meditations focus on emptiness and Klein saw Ultramarine as the color of the void.







I've begun to make a list of memorable and compelling places I could visualize to meditate on different moods. I already have too many. It's a good feeling to feel; I realize most of my thinking goes into solving my anxieties, and I need to set time aside to focus on the beauty I've been able to experience. Here's a list of some of the things.

The first thing I thought of was a Georgia O'Keeffe show my aunt took me to see at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Half of these dream places are in San Francisco; I really want to go back. Maybe forever. Anyway, we saw this painting and we both just wept at how beautiful it was. Ever since I am the kind of person who cries by myself in art museums.



I guess I'll run through the other San Francisco ones quickly. My aunt worked on a funeral boat so I got to ride along out past the bridge while we scattered people's ashes into the bay. So, that feeling. When I was 13 and a budding homosexual my aunt took me to see a movie at the Castro theater. I remember feeling terrified being in the city and seeing beautiful men kissing on street corners and wearing leather, but I'm grateful to her knowing what it would mean to show me one the gayest places in the world. It was an unspoken "it gets better" conversation.



Another more fleeting memory is the time I went to the aviary at the National Zoo. I love parrots, and my favorite parrot of all/spirit animal is the Eclectus parrot. They are big weird fruit eating parrots from some islands north of Australia. Their feathers are really fine, almost like hair. The males are green while the females are red and blue. They are also one of 3 species of parrots that are almost guaranteed to learn to talk in captivity. Anyway, I knew one was somewhere in the aviary and finally I found her sitting on a branch just above one of the walkways, warbling sounds that I realized were the repeated whispery conversations of zoo-goers. It was like an encounter with a superintelligent alien. Or an angel.



Look, they love contemporary christian music! Things have come full circle, Happy Easter!

I can't seem to upload any more photos, so I guess this will have to be part 1 in a series. ~TTYL YALL~

Hey yall

Well, what is there to say at this point?



I met Kate Bornstein IRL today. I cried about it, as I am wont to do. She told me to stay alive. <3



I guess I never talked about Elizabeth Taylor's passing. I had rented Butterfield 8 and watched it the night before (and HATED it) but then I read that she also hated it, even though she won an Oscar for it. Anyway, I felt guilty, but I don't anymore. <3



oh and

Nikki Giovanni “Dreams”

i used to dream militant dreams
of taking over america
to show these white folks how it should be done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away
with my perceptive powers of correct analysis
i even used to think
id be the one to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural dreams
of being a natural woman
doing what a woman does
when shes natural
i would have a revolution